The Undivided Heart (Matthew 5:17-37)

There is something both deeply unsettling and deeply hopeful about today’s Gospel because Jesus refuses to let us stay on the surface of things. He will not allow us the comfort of appearances, the safety of rule keeping without relationship, or the illusion that we can live divided lives one on the inside, and another on the outside. We know what that divided life looks like. "You have heard that it was said"… but I say to you. With those words Jesus does not abolish the law, rather, he reveals its deepest meaning. He takes what was written on stone tablets and writes it into human hearts, drawing us back to the God who gave the law in the first place as a path to life. From the beginning what has been at stake is not rule keeping but relationship, not compliance, but communion, not appearances but wholeness. God’s law was never meant to be an end in itself. It was meant to guard what is fragile human life, human dignity, human connection. Because of that Jesus names what we would rather not name. He speaks of anger that murders relationships long before any weapon is lifted, of words that kill through insult, contempt, and dismissal of desires that reduce people to objects of truth that is bent or shaded. He shows us that we can look righteous and still be deeply divided.

 

And what we refuse to face within ourselves will inevitably spill outward onto spouses friends, coworker’s,strangers,even enemies,. In the deep heart of our lives we find love and anger, faithfulness and betrayal, compassion and indifference, forgiveness and condemnation. We find wounds we have not tended, desires we have not named, grief we have buried, and longings we barely admit even to ourselves. And yet God already knows all of it. Nothing is hidden from the One who created us. Jesus is not trying to shame, us he is trying to make us whole. He is calling us to live undivided lives where our yes is truly yes, and our no is truly no, now here our inner life and outer life speak the same language. This is why Jesus is so critical of the scribes and Pharisees. They mastered compliance but lost connection. They kept the rules but forgot the relationship. They knew the law but missed the heart of God. So when Jesus tells us not to harbour hateful anger or call people fool or worthless . he is not merely giving moral advice. He is revealing a spiritual reality. If we walk around all day thinking, What idiots  we are ,we are not living out of life we are living out of death. What lives in our hearts shapes the world we create around us. How we live in our hearts is our deepest truth.

Teresa of Avila offers a simple image. She says the soul is like a great castle and most of us live in the outer rooms,busy ,respectable, and distracted while God waits for us at the centre. God is not absent. We are simply afraid to go inside. Yet when our inner life is rooted in God, our outer life will bear the fruit of the kingdom. And that is where true freedom, true wholeness and true life are found.

 

- Lilly Pushpam PBVM